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Question Someone is upgrading their storage servers.

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fzabkar said:
Unless these drives have been refurbished by the factory, I can't see what the seller could be doing to them to be able to legitimately make that same claim.

Also, these drives have new firmware architecture which isn't yet supported by professional data recovery tools. That makes me wonder whether the seller could actually clear the SMART data.
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Not truly factory refurbished; these are server pulls. But these vendors call them "refurbished," presumably because that sounds better than used.

Server Part Deals is known to reset the SMART data for (all of) its drives; no idea if they stopped doing that for newer firmware architecture. goHardDrives tends to leave the SMART data as-is, but sometimes resets them. Who knows why.

bigboxes said:
If you're not a business, who cares if they're refurbed. HGST makes great drives. I sure wish that WD hadn't bought them out. I'm assuming that they kept the tech with their Ultrastar drives. I have a couple of my server drives are WD Ultrastars.

When I was building my current main rig (in sig) three years ago, I replaced my three HGST 2TB (thrash) drives with new identical drives. Why? Because the older ones lasted 10 years of heavy 24/7 use. Only one was failing, but after 10 years it was an easy call. They were cheap at that point and they arrived brand freaking new. No refurb.

Speaking of servers... I just fixed my home server. Was down for a month. I'm going to miss the silence.
pQZ6QaY.png
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Is that a Cheese grater pro? Looks like you still use it! Love the cable management, can I take your master class? 🙂
 
manly said:
Not truly factory refurbished; these are server pulls. But these vendors call them "refurbished," presumably because that sounds better than used.

Server Part Deals is known to reset the SMART data for (all of) its drives; no idea if they stopped doing that for newer firmware architecture. goHardDrives tends to leave the SMART data as-is, but sometimes resets them. Who knows why.


Is that a Cheese grater pro? Looks like you still use it! Love the cable management, can I take your master class? 🙂
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It's the Lian-Li case on the right. And thanks for the compliment. Yeah, the last time I redid my server I paid a little more attention to cable management and aesthetics. It's like computer porn. 😛
 
Well, new drives are installed. Everything seems to work fine. How do I view SMART data on Truenas Scale? So I can share how long they have been used, in particular.
 
Alright, so I figured it out, have to do a sudo smartctl -a in command line. Looks like the drives have between 29k and 40k power on hours. But no errors, all healthy.
 
Shmee said:
Alright, so I figured it out, have to do a sudo smartctl -a in command line. Looks like the drives have between 29k and 40k power on hours. But no errors, all healthy.
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As expected. What RAID level are you running? I've never used TrueNAS; does it have badblocks to exhaustively test the entire disk drives?
 
manly said:
As expected. What RAID level are you running? I've never used TrueNAS; does it have badblocks to exhaustively test the entire disk drives?
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I am running 2 Mirrors, each 2 disks wide. I am unsure all of what features it has built in for testing drives, but I know it supports short and extended SMART tests.
 
Not from GoHardDrive, but I bought three 3TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 drives back in 2020 from Amazon. They were listed under Amazon Renewed brand and came with a 5yr warrenty. The power on count was 1 for each drive and the run time was 15, 23, and 22 hours. All three are still running as steam drives in my kids computers. So, I would say for not mission critical data used enterpise drives are great.
 
Without reading through all the posts, I think the OP found a great price, and the drive manufacturer and model has a good reputation. For refurbs and "pulls", they offer warranties in inverse proportion to the number of power-on hours stored on the drive. that will also affect offer-price.
 
Shmee said:
Well, new drives are installed. Everything seems to work fine. How do I view SMART data on Truenas Scale? So I can share how long they have been used, in particular.
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Apparently, I needed to sign for the package so missed the delivery. Picked up the drives. So far 2 have about 28k hours which is coincidentally about the same as the current desktop hard drives I have installed in my FX8350. Everything is in the green though speccy reports a temp of 38c vs 23c on my internal hard drives. The 2 12 Tb are in an external dock.
 
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I am going to keep those cases in mind. I am putting this in a fire safe off site so that doesn't work as well atm but that does make a lot of sense and is way better than my alternative atm, which is stacked drives in a file cabinet drawer 😀
 
blckgrffn said:
I am going to keep those cases in mind. I am putting this in a fire safe off site so that doesn't work as well atm but that does make a lot of sense and is way better than my alternative atm, which is stacked drives in a file cabinet drawer 😀
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It's waterproof which was the problem that started this post. One small down side, with 20 drives the thing weighs a ton.
 
When moving to my new place, the heaviest thing was the garbage bag, enclosed in another garbage bag, housing my HDDs. My friend volunteered to carry it and when he got to the car, he was fully out of breath and regretting the volunteering 😀
 
manly said:
New low price of $80:

www.ebay.com

HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA 6Gb 256MB 3.5" Enterprise HDD- HUH721212ALE601 | eBay

[ G01-1549-CR-5YR ] HGST Ultrastar HC520 HUH721212ALE601 12TB 7200RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Helium Datacenter Hard Drive (Certified Refurbished) - 5 Year Warranty. Why does helium make a diference?.
www.ebay.com

Seller rating is 99.8% positive. Not bad for a “scummy” company.
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From what I have observed the price will drop as they sell out. When I bought 4TB refurbed Seagate drives about a year ago for 40USD each. They dropped to 27USD before they were no longer available. But they seem to ship the low hour drives first probably to minimize early failure rates. I have to check my two other drives but the first 2 had about 28k hours.
 
jamesdsimone said:
From what I have observed the price will drop as they sell out. When I bought 4TB refurbed Seagate drives about a year ago for 40USD each. They dropped to 27USD before they were no longer available. But they seem to ship the low hour drives first probably to minimize early failure rates. I have to check my two other drives but the first 2 had about 28k hours.
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What's the failure rate on Seagate these days? I used to be a loyal customer, but the failure rates were insane. Then they shortened their warranty. Has Seagate improved their quality? I got tired of it and moved my data to HGST drives. To me, it wasn't worth the lower cost per/GB. I was tired of worrying about my data because of drive failures happening so often. It was worth the cost to make the switch.
 
bigboxes said:
What's the failure rate on Seagate these days? I used to be a loyal customer, but the failure rates were insane. Then they shortened their warranty. Has Seagate improved their quality? I got tired of it and moved my data to HGST drives. To me, it wasn't worth the lower cost per/GB. I was tired of worrying about my data because of drive failures happening so often. It was worth the cost to make the switch.
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Backblaze has tons of data. Looking only at 12TB capacity, the HGST drives are more reliable than Seagate. In general, HDD have been getting more reliable. Personally I wouldn't buy a Seagate consumer HDD, and the basic IronWolf drive is arguably a dressed-up consumer drive.

Here's their blog post from a couple years ago:

Drive Failure Over Time: The Bathtub Curve Is Leaking

Hard drive failure rates tend to follow the “bathtub curve.” What is this curve, and how does it indicate the drive failure rates at Backblaze?
www.backblaze.com www.backblaze.com

But the failure rates have crept up since 2021 (as the drives age):

Hard Drive Failure Rates: The Official Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023

Read the 2023 Drive Stats Report and the latest insights on drive failure from Andy Klein. Read the 2023 Drive Stats Report and the latest insights on drive failure from Andy Klein.
www.backblaze.com www.backblaze.com
 
I pretty much stopped giving Seagate consideration. I have 6GB disc drive somewhere. It was cool when it was a large size. It was able to power over USB bus. Built in dongle. But no more Seagate HDDs in my system. I've still got stacks of them.
 
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